and agreeable. You must therefore be an enemy to your own enjoyments, if you enter on the difcipline which leads to the attainment of a claffical and liberal education with reluctance. Value duly the opportunities you enjoy, and which are denied to thousands of your fellow-creatures. Without exemplary diligence you will make but a contemptible proficiency. You may, indeed, pafs through the forms of schools and univerfities, but you will bring nothing away from them of real value. The proper fort and degree of diligence you cannot poffefs, but by the efforts of your own refolution. Your inftructor may, indeed, confine you within the walls of a school a certain number of hours. He may place books before you, and compel you to fix your eyes upon them; but no authority can chain down your mind. Your thoughts will escape from every external reftraint, and, amidst the moft ferious lectures, may be ranging in the wild purfuit of trifles or vice. Rules, reftraints, commands, and punishments, may, indeed, affift in ftrengthening your refolution; but, without your own voluntary choice, your diligence will not often conduce to your pleasure or advantage. Obvious as is this truth, yet it feems to be a fecret to thofe parents who expect to find their fons improvement in proportion to the number of tutors and external affiftances, which their opulence has enabled them to provide. These affiftances, indeed, are fometimes afforded, chiefly with a view to enable the young heir to a title or eftate, to indulge in idlene and nominal pleasures. The leffon is conftrued to him, and the exercise written by the private tutor, while the hapless youth is engaged in fome ruinous pleafure, which, at the fame time, prevents him from learning any thing defirable, and leads to the formation of deftructive habits, which can seldom be removed. But the principal obftacle to improvement at your fchool, efpecially if you are too plentifully fupplied with money, is a perverfe ambition of being diftinguifhed as a boy of fpirit in mifchievous pranks, in neglecting the talks and leffons, and for every vice and irregularity which the puerile age can admit. You will have fenfe enough, I hope, to discover, beneath the mask of C 5 gaiety gaiety and good-nature, that malignant fpirit of detraction, which endeavours to render the boy who applies to books, and to all the duties and proper business of the fchool, ridiculous. You will fee, by the light of your reafon, that the ridicule is mifapplied. You will difcover, that the boys who have recourfe to ridicule, are, for the moft part, ftupid, unfeeling, ignorant, and vicious. Their noify folly, their bold confidence, their contempt of learning, and their defiance of authority are, for the moft part, the genuine effects of hardened infenfibility. Let not their infults and ill-treatment difpirit you. If you yield to them with a tame and abject fubmiffion, they will not fail to triumph over you with additional infolence. Difplay a fortitude in your pursuits, equal in degree to the obftinacy in which they perfift in theirs. Your fortitude will foon overcome theirs; which is, indeed, feldom any thing more than the audacity of a bully. Indeed, you cannot go through a fchool with eafe to yourfelf, and fuccefs, without a confiderable fhare of courage. I do not mean that fort of courage which leads to battles and contentions, but which enables you to have a will of your own, and to purfue what is right, amidst all the perfecutions of furrounding enviers, dunces, and detractors. Ridicule is the weapon made ufe of at fchool, as well as in the world, when the fortreffes of virtue are to be affailed. You will effectually repel the attack by a dauntless fpirit and unyielding perfeverance. Though numbers are against you, yet, with truth and rectitude on your fide, you may be ipfe agmen, though alone, yet equal to an army. By laying in a ftore of ufeful knowledge, adorning your mind with elegant literature, improving and eftablishing your conduct by virtuous principles, you cannot fail of being a comfort to thofe friends who have fupported you, of being happy within yourself, and of being well received by mankind. Honour and fuccefs in life will probably attend you. Under all circumftances you will have an internal refource of confolation and entertainment, of which no fublunary viciffitude can deprive you. Time fhews how much wifer your choice than that of your id'e companions, who would gladly gladly have drawn you into their affociation, or rather their confpiracy, as it has been called, againft good manners, and all that is honourable and ufeful. While you appear in fociety as a refpectable and valuable member of it, they have facrificed, at the fhrine of vanity, pride, extravagance, and falfe pleasure, their health and their fenfe, their fortunes and their characters. No. XC. THE WANT OF PIETY ARISES. FROM THE WANT OF SENSIBILITY. IT appears to me, that the mind of man, when it is free from natural defects and acquired corruption, feels no lefs a tendency to the indulgence of devotion, than to love, or to any other of the more refined and elevated affections. But debauchery and excefs contribute greatly to deftroy all the fufceptible delicacy with which nature ufually furnishes the heart; and in the general extinction of our better qualities, it is no wonder that fo pure a fentiment as that of piety, fhould . be one of the first to expire. It is certain that the understanding may be improved in a knowledge of the world, and in the arts of fucceeding in it, while the heart, or whatever conftitutes the feat of the moral and fentimental feelings, is gradually receding from its original perfection. Indeed, experience feems to evince, that it is hardly poffible to arrive at the chara&er of a complete man of the world, without lofing many of the most valuable fentiments of uncorrupted nature. A complete man of the world is an artificial being; he has difcarded many of the native and laudable tendencies of his mind, and adopted a new fyftem of objects and propenfities of his own creation. Thefe are commonly grofs, coarse, fordid, selfish, and fenfual. All, or either of thefe attributes, tend directly to blunt the fenfe of every thing liberal, enlarged, difinterested; of every thing which partici pates pates more of an intellectual than of a fenfual nature. When the heart is tied down to the earth by luft and avarice, it is not extraordinary, that the eye should be feldom lifted up to heaven. To the man who spends his Sunday in the counting-houfe, in travelling (because the day is fit for little elfe) in a poft-coach and four, in the tavern, or in the brothel, those who go to church appear as fools, and the business they go upon as nonfenfe. He is callous to the feelings of devotion; but he is tremblingly alive to all that gratifies his fenfes or his intereft. It has been remarked of thofe writers who have attacked christianity, and reprefented all religions merely as diverfified modes of fuperftition, that they were indeed, for the moft part, men of a metaphyfical and a difputatious turn of mind, but ufually little dif tinguished for benignity and generofity. There was, amidst all the pretenfions to logical fagacity, a cloudinefs of ideas, and a coldness of heart, which rendered them very unfit judges on a queftion in which the heart is chiefly interefted; in which the language of nature is more expreffive and convincing, than all the dreary fubtleties of the difmal metaphyficians. Even the reafoning faculty, on which we fo greatly value ourselves, may be perverted by refinement; and there is an abftrufe, but vain and foolish philofophy, which philofophizes us out of the nobleft parts of our noble nature. One of thofe parts of us is our inftinctive fenfe of religion, of which not one of those brutes which the philofophers moft admire, and to whofe rank they wish to reduce us, is found, in the flighteft degree, to participate. Such philofophers may be called, in a double fense, the enemies of mankind. They not only endeavour to entice man from his duty, but to rob him of a most exalted and natural pleafure. Such, furely, is the pleasure of devotion. For when the foul rifes above this little orb, and pours its adoration at the throne of celeftial majefty, the holy fervour which it feels is itfelf a rapturous delight. Neither is this a declamatory re-. prefentation, but a truth felt and acknowledged by all the fons of men; except thofe who have been defective in fenfibility, or who hoped to gratify the pride or the malignity malignity of their hearts, by fingular and pernicious fpeculation. Indeed, all difputatious, controverfial, and metaphyfical writings, on the fubject of religion, are unfavourable to genuine piety. We do not find, that the moft renowned polemics in the church militant, were at all more attentive than others to the common offices of religion, or that they were actuated by any peculiar degree of devotion. The truth is, their religion centered in their heads; whereas its natural region is the heart. The heart! confined, alas! in colleges or libraries, unacquainted with all the tender charities of hufband, father, brother, friend; fome of them have almost forgotten that they poffefs a heart. It has long ceafed to beat with the pulfations of love and fympathy, and has been engroffed by pride on conquering an adverfary in the fyllogiftic combat, or by impotent anger on a defeat. With fuch habits, and fo defective a fyftem of feelings, can we expect that a Doctor of the Sorbonne, or the difputing profeffor of divinity, fhould ever feel the flame that glowed in the bofoms of Mrs. Rowe, Mrs. Talbot, or Mr. Nelson ?. An inexperienced and unobfervant man might expect to find extraordinary devotion and piety in the chapels and colleges of our English univerfities. Many of our academics are fummoned to prayers, not lefs often than four times every day throughout the year. But do they attend voluntarily, or in obedience to a ftatute? Is there any particular piety or decency in the performance of public worship? Quite the reverfe; for in no place of worship are the prayers read in a more careless or perfunctory manner; in none are more indecencies practifed and connived at than in the chapels of our English univerfities. The reason is, that those who attend in them confift, for the moft part, either of jolly fellows, who drown all thoughts in wine and its concomitants; or of dry logicians and metaphyficians. who, in the towering heights of their wifdom, are fuperior to the weakneffes of a devotee. I have feen in many a country church, where the congregation confifted only of honeft hufbandmen and their families, decency and more devotion, than in any chapel in more the |